Autodiscover is how Outlook finds a mailbox for an account. Autodiscover can be used for on-premises Exchange as well as Office 365 and generic Hosted Exchange. Autodiscover is a fantastic lookup service but it can also present challenges when things aren’t configured correctly. Some of the challenges are:
- Autodiscover can be very difficult to track down why its not working or why an account can’t validate against it.
- The error messages from the Autodiscover service are often cryptic (its not our fault). The error messages are cryptic because it would be a vulnerability if the service told you too much.
- Older on-premises autodiscover installations can get in the way of Office 365
CloudReady synthetics can provide an autodiscover test with each of its Exchange based sensors.